Existing collaboration products are designed to transmit all user messages across one or more networks. Data is never recorded for later playback and inspection or to support security concerns of logging both user actions and transmitted data. Existing solutions generally require expensive, dedicated network links. Existing networks must provide collaboration or data services, but not simultaneously, and are limited in their scalability. Existing collaboration services do not provide security levels for protecting sensitivity of the data. Generally, external physical restrictions are typically required to isolate the information in the collaboration session using dedicated networks and facilities.
Existing security solutions have limited bandwidth and high latency limitations that prohibit real-time, rich collaboration that accommodate extremely large, data-intensive multimedia formats such as images and video. Real-time collaboration requires that information be exchanged at transmission rates that are imperceptible to humans and keeps pace with the speed of natural human dialog and system access rates or even faster to meet critical timelines.
Existing solutions often rely on personal warranty of participants not to leak sensitive information and require inspecting the entire data stream through a high assurance data guard over an Internet Protocol (IP) network. These guards act as intermediaries between users in a collaboration session. These products receive a communication from the first user, inspect the contents of the message, and then either re-transmit the data to the intended receiver or block the transmission.
A traditional data guard or security firewall requires all data to flow through the network in order to perform “deep packet inspection” to review the contents for any sensitive data. This process is expensive both in bandwidth and latency. The bandwidth is limited by the number of packets that the guard may process. The latency is limited by the speed at which the guard may inspect and process the data packet.
If a user is not able to receive a collaboration communication in real-time, there is no mechanism in existing solutions to retrieve the data without the use of a separate process to record and distribute the information. Current systems employ limited logging of data that has been accessed or transported, and security reviews consist or file names and/or User ID only, without access to the full content of the transmitted data.
Collaboration may require real-time exchange of information between multiple parties. In a networked computer environment, this requires low-latency transmission of data. More effective collaboration frequently requires more information, which may increase the size of the data to be exchanged, which leads to greater bandwidth requirements for the collaboration system.
As a result, there is presently a need for a more secure real-time collaboration system.